View Single Post
Old 06-16-2010, 05:14 PM   #19
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Hitch's Avatar
 
Posts: 11,445
Karma: 157030631
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Device: K2, iPad, KFire, PPW, Voyage, NookColor. 2 Droid, Oasis, Boox Note2
And today's stupid pet trick IS....

Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski View Post
This is a problem with mobipocket's interpretation of the OPF (which uses the guide rather than the spine). The way to fix it is to edit the spine element in your .opf file and take the coverpage out of the linear flow.
Code:
  <spine toc="ncx">
    <itemref idref="coverpage" linear="no"/>
    ...
  </spine>
  <guide>
    <reference href="coverpage.xhtml" type="cover" title="Cover"/>
    ...
  </guide>
If you do this then the cover won't appear in the standard flow of text. Calibre's reader will shunt it to the end, but ADE will catch it from the reference in the guide section and put it at the front. While ADE is smart enough to recognise when it should do this, the mobipocket standard isn't, so a lot of ePubs use this hack to make it easier to convert for the Kindle.
I admit, I'm not sure how ADE got into this mix, but I am grateful for the info. Given everything, I think I'm just going to stick with Prince, convert all the chapters at once, and send them to her all at once or zipped (I don't think she knows how to open a zip, though).

Quote:
xhtml is just a stricter form of html*. Anything that can read html (well, anything from the past 10 years) will have no problem with xhtml.
As for putting it back into Word - this is the main reason I still use the old (pre-0.2.0) version of Sigil. Open the book in 0.1.8 or 0.1.9, go to code view and you have all the code laid out for you. Copy everything (in code view) then paste it into a blank text document (in Notepad or something like that). Go to the top and remove the line saying
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
then save the text document and change the extension to .html. Now open in Word and you have the epub with all its formatting. Page-breaks that are forced through flow breaks will be indicated by a horizontal rule, as in Sigil. If you want to bring over all the images you need to replicate the directory structure: create a directory for the book and then inside it make two folders, 'images' and 'text'. Put the html file in the 'text' folder and extract all the images to the 'images' folder.
I should have been clearer. I know what xhtml is; I was shorthanding, and I should not have. I should have said: I don't have anything to hand that will take all these divergent xhtml files and MOOSH them together automatically so I can strip out the xml encoding and make it one big html file. What I have is about 20-30 xhtml files, plus cover, images, blah-blah, per book for four books. I could, if I wasn't lazy, ;-), pull out the relevant html from each file and cut-and-paste it into my text editor and make an html file out of it; I was trying to find something that would automate the process, first, so I could print the sucker (or, actually, so I could print to PrimoPDF so my client could print it), and now, humorously, because she's decided she wants the ability to EDIT it. (Do NOT get me started; that's today's hurdle).
Quote:
*Actually it's a bit more complex than that, but since your destination is print in this case the nuances don't really matter.
Argh! If I didn't have ten books in-house to do, I'd chuck it over and go back to something simple like editing. I don't mind the conversions, I don't, but the other brain-damage is, well, brain-damaging.

My new coined phrase for having to PRINT or create editable ebook files (i.e., Word or OO or whatever-the-frack) is "backwardization." I'm being backwardized against my will. I think that there's a statute on the books about that, somewhere. LOL!!

On a bright note, my other clients have downloaded Kindle for PC, or the FF-epub add-on, so that they can see the work (I've taken to insisting now), and I've learned to do as MUCH AS POSSIBLE in the actual Word/html file, rather than using regex (sob) in my text editor, because the client MAY want the file to be editable, and having two versions causes this type of mayhem with my serenity. Artists. They'll be the death of me.

Yanking my hair out, but still grateful for the help of everyone here,

Hitch
Hitch is offline   Reply With Quote